Kind of funny that I called it Viewpoint without really thinking about the relation to POV.

David: you’re probably right…though i tend to think of audience at one end of the spectrum, and writer at the other, and point in the middle–but then we can change all the terms around and reinterpret them as you say.

The Human Experience really is the number one.

Conscious, intentional writing’to theme’ tends not to work, at least in print fiction. It is the unconscious that develops that, with the emblems, symbols, repetitions, image clusters that enforce the theme (and characters too, often). Personally I cannot see how anyone could do that intentionally as a first draft, at least.

When you have the entire map of the work laid out in front of your eyes, and you go over it from beginning to end to begin the revising, rewriting, and so on, you — at least I am — are so surprised to see what is there. Then you can punch it up or delete it or whatever seems best to you in the rewriting and editing processes.

It seems theme can work on an intentional level very successfully though, in an arc television program, for instance.

That Ford continues throughout his career to make movies that have a theme of family and community is not what he did consciously, from everything those who knew him say, yet the concerns of family and community worked very powerfully within him, and those concerns emerged again and again in the movies he directed.

Love, C.

Did you ever read his very silly sex books, such as The Origins of the Sexual Impulse? These can really be barf-inducing, especially the risible writing itself.

Love, C.